“4 ways to earn real money from your small business” ~ a guest blog from Catherine Eardley.
This blog focuses on you as a small business owner, and ways you can earn real money from it – even when times are hard.
You deserve to be paid properly for your work!
Are you paying yourself well?
Paying yourself from your own product business…say it again to yourself out loud…paying yourself from your own product business.
Does that sound strange? Probably, because it is so common for small product business owners to not pay themselves, and not only that, for many it feels like an impossible dream. However, you can definitely take the leap, and learn the best ways to earn real money from your small business.
I firmly believe that paying yourself is something that you can and should be planning in your business. Yet, about 75% of the product business founders I surveyed earlier this year did not pay themselves from their business at all – and some of those businesses have been running for over 3 years!
There is a belief that when you first start out that you shouldn’t pay yourself and everything should go back into the business – but I would challenge that idea, because ultimately what are you building your business for? You’re building it to help support you, build the life that you want to lead, or support a cause that you feel really passionate about.
It is very hard for you to do that if you don’t have any financial reward. It may not be something you can do overnight, but building into your business planning the idea that you need to be paid is a really important step.
Otherwise, we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that all of our money has to constantly get reinvested into the business when actually, believe it or not, that’s not always the best approach for your business!
Paying yourself needs to be an intentional act. You can’t just suddenly decide you want to pay yourself and start taking money out of the business overnight – there are 4 main factors to consider first.
Although there are lots of ways to earn real money from your small business, here are the 4 best plans of action.
4 ways to earn real money from your small business
1. Price it right
The first one is really crucial – the difference between what you buy an item for and what you sell it for. That is the only income that you have, so you have to guard that relationship carefully. Getting the price right is crucial to starting to earn money from your small business.
If there’s not enough money between what you paid for an item and what you sell it for, you will struggle to build a profitable business, and you will struggle to pay yourself too. When all of the other costs have been taken out of the business then there simply isn’t going to be enough left for you if there isn’t enough profit in the first place.
Review your prices. Complete the exercise where you look at each one of your products and work out how much money you’re actually making on each one.
2. Have a sales plan for market
You need to have a sales forecast; a sales plan – an understanding of how much money you think you’re going to be getting into your business. It’s a forecast – a prediction – it doesn’t have to be 100% accurate but you do need to have a figure to work with. It’s very hard for you to plan to take money out of the business if you have no idea how much is going to be coming in.
A lot of people feel very nervous about sales plans because they worry “how am I supposed to work out how much money I’m going take?’ As I said, a sales forecast doesn’t have to be 100% accurate. It’s about having a plan and then adjusting it as you go along and reacting to sales numbers, always adjusting your plan accordingly. If you don’t have any plan and you don’t have any forecast then it’s very difficult for you to map out how you’re going to actually pay yourself.
3. Control your costs
I talk about the stock monster. The stock monster always wants to be fed – that means you can always buy more stock for your business. You will always have new product ideas, you’ll always see amazing items that you’ll want to bring into your business to offer to your customer.
If you keep putting the money from your business into your stock with no budget, limit or cap, you will never take the money out of the business to pay yourself – it will already have gone on stock.
Get really clear about how much you want to spend on stock each time you purchase it, and be disciplined. If you have that amount of stock in your business already – don’t bring more in. Look at what you can clear out and discipline yourself in sticking with the planned stock level, and clearing out old stock. This will help you free up more cash in your business, and ultimately cash flow is what enables you to pay yourself, so that you can start earning real money from your small business.
4. Make a commitment
Prioritise the ways to earn real money from your small business – plan to pay yourself from your small business and make the commitment to follow through. There’s an endless number of things that you could spend money on for your business so you need to plan in the expense of your pay-cheque.
Ask yourself – if you’ve been running your business at 100% of your sales income, can you run it at 99% or 96%? This will enable you to carve out a small percentage to pay yourself. You can start small and over time adjust your figures to a workable salary.
Why have you taken the brave leap into running your own product business if paying yourself isn’t on your to do list? You can start earning real money from your small business. You’re worth it!
This blog was originally written by Catherine Erdly, Founder of Future Retail Consulting, on behalf of Pedddle. To find out more about Catherine and her work, visit her website at www.futureretail.world.
This article first appeared on the Future Retail blog at https://www.futureretail.world/blog/paying-yourself-from-your-product-business and has been optimised for Pedddle into the blog “4 ways to earn real money from your small business”, by the Pedddle team.
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